


At Regular Intervals

by entanglednow



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Concussions, Headaches & Migraines, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-01
Updated: 2012-09-01
Packaged: 2017-11-13 07:32:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/501014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entanglednow/pseuds/entanglednow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This day ends with a traumatic head injury.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At Regular Intervals

This has been the worst day.

There's no doubt about it, this is officially the worst day ever. There have been a lot of bad days lately, usually they end with people missing, or eaten, or at the very least they end with some sort of terrible, public humiliation.

This one ends with a traumatic head injury.

Honestly it had to happen eventually. The amount of times Stiles gets thrown against walls, or pushed down onto the floor, or sideswiped by monsters. He feels like he was just waiting to get knocked unconscious.

Stiles had accomplished the walk back to his Jeep, with Scott's help. Though Scott hadn't let him drive, due to his inability to distinguish fingers from the blurry shapes that looked like fingers. He'd taken him home, and the only thing stopping him from carrying Stiles up the stairs had been a pointed elbow to the middle of the chest. Scott's usually pretty good about the whole 'being a stupidly durable werewolf,' thing. But every so often he'll just effortlessly make Stiles feel like some sort of squidgy, easily broken doll. At least when Derek does it Stiles knows he's just doing it because he's an asshole. From Scott it genuinely hurts.

It doesn't help that Stiles currently feels like a squidgy, easily breakable doll - that someone had dropped.

So, yeah, the worst day ever, and one that shows no sign of ending any time soon. Because after painkillers, and an hour to make sure his vision was working again Scott had insisted that someone needed to wake him up every two hours, to make sure he hadn't died. Scott had to be home by midnight, but he was worried enough that he was going to stay anyway and get yelled at tomorrow.

Stiles doesn't know why Derek volunteered. Doesn't he have a pack to go and angst in front of, laundry to do, bullet holes to duct tape over?

Derek watching him sleep isn't creepy at all - no, that's a lie, it's creepy as fuck. Stiles had tried to make him leave. But he really wasn't in any condition to be loud, or demanding, or upright, or around any bright lights or objects of any kind. Because his head can't cope with any of that right now. Derek had helped to hold him upright at one point, and it's impossible to win an argument against someone who was making sure you didn't fall on your face. Or helping you to get out of your jacket and shoes. Not that Stiles hadn't kept arguing anyway, quietly and with ever-decreasing levels of enthusiasm.

He was still complaining, quietly and painfully, when he pushed his jeans off and crawled into bed, laid his thumping head against the cool pillow.

-

"Stiles."

He's been asleep about five minutes. This is so unfair.

Derek's dragged a chair over to the bed and has folded himself into it, back to the window - possibly so he could leap into the night at a moment's notice. There's enough of a moon behind him that Stiles can pick out his blurry outline, the stupid spikes of his hair, and the hard curve of his jaw. But even those little shafts of light make him want to squeeze his own eyeballs. His brain still feels two sizes too big for the inside of his skull, squeezing and stabbing where it meets the inside, and the fact that he can feel that now is really gross.

"Could you have picked a more sinister and threatening pose, seriously?" Stiles complains. He stops trying to look at Derek with both eyes because it hurts too much. Shutting one of them is bearable. Sure he's now officially a deranged pirate but he'll take what he can get.

"Headache? Nausea?" Derek's voice is quiet and Stiles thinks that's for his benefit, because no one else is home.

"Yes, and maybe," he says.

"Who's the president?"

It's the obligatory question you ask someone who's gotten smacked in the head and knocked unconscious. Scott's probably left Derek some sort of list.

"Strawberry ice cream," Stiles says, just to be difficult. "Come on, dude, I have a mild concussion. You don't even have to wake me up. I'm not going to slip into a coma, or forget my own name."

"I don't even know your name." Derek seems to realise suddenly, and there's an amusing dent between his eyebrows that Stiles kind of wants to stab with a finger.

"Maybe _you_ have a traumatic brain injury too," Stiles says, with fake sympathy. "You should get someone to come bug the shit out of you when you're trying to sleep."

"You were unconscious," Derek says, though he says it in a way that suggests it's one of those fragile, human things that only happens to fragile humans. Stiles really wants to be pissed about that, but everything is kind of fuzzy and painful.

"Not for that long."

"Seven minutes," Derek says stiffly - and he's a weirdo for knowing that.

Stiles winces and drags the pillow back over his face. "Yeah, and I didn't even get to make out with anyone. Could you not sit there, because staring at the window and all its drunken, over-excitable moonlight hurts like hell at the minute. Talking hurts, everything hurts, you're an awful person for making me."

He doesn't hear Derek's reply because he's tired, he's so very tired, and the bed is warm and dark, and keeping his eyes open just makes his brain thump unpleasantly in his skull. Enough that he can feel the rolling edge of nausea as a possibility in the distance. So, yeah, he's checking out.

-

"It has not been two hours," Stiles complains groggily when someone grips his ankle and squeezes. But the clock tells him that it has, because it's a filthy traitor. The numbers are blinking aggressively, and his headache is no better. It's still a thunderous drumming. He can actually feel his heartbeat pushing blood around inside his head, a squishing, throbbing thump and squeeze that's going to make him feel sick again if he concentrates on it too long. But it doesn't hurt to look at things so much any more. Both his eyes are open at least. Though his mouth tastes like someone went to war inside it - and lost.

Derek's sitting at the end of the bed, towards the darkness of the room. He's kicked his shoes off, anti-social werewolves apparently have the courtesy to take their shoes off before they invade your personal bed-space.

"You were busy the day they taught everyone about personal space weren't you?"

Derek just glares at him from the end of the bed. But Stiles knows what Derek's angry glaring looks like. This one isn't even trying that hard.

"Still creepy," Stiles tells him.

There's a quiet huff of air, which suggests Derek doesn't care about human beings and their need for personal space. He may also be smiling creepily, but Stiles has no proof because it's too dark to see Derek's face.

"You don't know anything about me, how are you supposed to check that my brains are scrambled?" Because he thinks that's a fair question.

"I know enough."

One day Stiles will manage to lure more than four words out of Derek at a time.

"Can't you tell with your ridiculous werewolf senses that I'm not dying in my sleep? Seriously, you can tell almost everything else."

Derek frowns. "I'm not a Doctor."

"Oddly enough, doctors probably don't know what serious head trauma smells like either."

"Blood mostly," Derek says flatly, which he should have expected. Also, Stiles thinks that may have been a joke.

"Ony if it's outside the body, surely?" Stiles says.

Derek stares at him some more without blinking. There really is no way for that not to be creepy. It's a good job they're friends. Sort of friends? Frenemies? Antagonistic comrades-in-arms? Flirtatious rivals? Stiles genuinely has no clue.

"Just so you know, if I wake up next time and you're in bed with me, or in any way spooning me, I will karate chop you in the face."

Derek makes a noise which might be amusement, or possibly werewolf-based mockery. Stiles is too tired to tell.

-

Stiles doesn't know how long Derek has been jostling him - he's being oddly gentle about it, and Stiles ignores him for at least a minute. But it's pretty clear he's not going to just let him sleep through this one.

"I'm the president," Stiles mumbles from under the sheets. "Also, it's four in the morning and I hate you."

"How's the head?" Derek says. He's still using his middle-of-the-night, Batman voice, even though it'll be light in a few hours.

"Still attached, though it feels like that's something I'm working on rather than a natural state. No, I don't feel sick, yes you're still creepy. Can I go back to sleep now?"

He swears he can hear Derek staring at him, Derek stares very loudly.

"Let me go back to sleep," Stiles says, already half in the pillow. "Or I'll tell everyone we're dating, and your reputation as a badass will be completely ruined." People might actually believe him too. Because the only other explanation for all the after-school appearances, invasions of personal space and suspicious angry touching is 'werewolves.' It turns out that 'scandalous, underage relationship' is so much easier to jump to than _werewolves_. He'd be surprised if people aren't thinking it already - and oh my God, they probably are. There are probably people out there right now who think he actually managed to get Derek Hale into bed for illicit, underage gay sex.

"You're thinking out loud," Derek says flatly.

"I have terrible head trauma," Stiles says, trying to decide if he's awake enough to be mortified. "Nothing I say can be held against me." He pulls the sheet over his head.

-

The next time he wakes up it's not because Derek shakes him. It's because there's a shaft of early sunlight making its way through the gap in the curtains. Derek's already halfway there when Stiles shoves himself out of the pillows. It takes a bit of shoving, he's stiff and sore, his body seems to think this is good opportunity to remind him that it's made of breakable bones and soft meat. There's a slow thump in his head, a reminder, but it's settled and it doesn't stab when he sits up.

"Hey, you leaving?"

Derek pauses by the window, outlined in sunlight, which should make him less threatening but Derek likes to rebel against looking less anything, so he still looks sort of leather-clad and threatening anyway.

"Your dad's going to be home soon."

Stiles checks the clock and Derek's right, ten minutes or so. Hey, he's survived the night with his brain intact. Even if he does still kind of feel like he needs a good night's sleep.

"Derek?"

Derek pauses, half-turned back towards him.

"Thanks," Stiles says. "For making sure I didn't die." He means it to sound casual, because this is probably the least life-threatening situation they've ended up in. They usually involve blood, and poison and occasionally drowning. But it doesn't sound casual at all. Stiles is a little embarrassed about the way it sounds.

But Derek nods slowly, then grips the window frame and slips through it, like he does it all the time - which, come to think of it, he kind of does.

Stiles's room still smells like Derek, leather and earth, and something heavy and animal-warm. He thinks maybe he could get used to it.


End file.
